Do you wish to stay anonymous while surfing the web? If yes, then AirVPN could be the perfect service for you.
While anybody can claim to be unique nowadays, when it concerns VPN providers, AirVPN reveals that it truly is.
AirVPN sticks out from other VPN services because of its commitment to safeguarding user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN site begins with an appeal for your trust, specifying, “A VPN based on OpenVPN and operated by activists and hacktivists in defence of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship”.While anybody can declare to be unique nowadays, when it concerns VPN companies, AirVPN reveals that it truly is.
They have actually been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was started with the help of two lawyers and a little group of hackers and activists. The satellite communications company Iridium formerly ran it, but AirVPN took control of in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is currently owned by Paolo Brini (Italy).
During the last decade, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a larger organization either.
Across their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is described and details the privacy projects that AirVPN has actually established or supported. These include an online encryption tool, a net neutrality monitor, and other projects such as Tor, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and WikiLeaks.
AirVPN takes the non-traditional route and breaks the mold by providing a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
So how does AirVPN compare to its competitors with such strong privacy qualifications?
AirVPN’s Key Features
Servers
AirVPN’s network is much smaller than many, with only 246 servers spread throughout 23 nations.
Many servers are in Europe (other than those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small issue here is that the absence of diversity of servers decreases the number of worldwide AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home nation while preserving their personal privacy.
That said, Air is well known for its exceptional performance throughout its server network, with lots of countries having high-performance physical individual servers.
They use transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to provide an accurate evaluation of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are totally unlimited, with no speed constraints or time limits.
To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they utilize OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most protected and dependable way to create encrypted tunnels. It uses more security than the military.
Many ports and protocols are readily available; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. Every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. So forget PPTP and other unsafe protocols.
No preference is given to any service, protocol, or application when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is upheld. Importantly, you can get rid of web restrictions such as avoiding censorship, geographic restrictions, and traffic shaping.
The usage is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it immediately improves users’ privacy and security and is extremely trusted. Nevertheless, the lack of WireGuard as standard might show Air isn’t quite staying up to date with its rivals. That stated, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, however it won’t put the newer protocol fully in place up until a few of its technical and personal privacy problems are addressed.
AirVPN has likewise added a lot for power users and tech-savvy individuals who like to try out things.
Switching is unlimited, so if you do not like one server, you can quickly switch servers as often as you like.
You can keep an eye on the present load on each server, any existing problems, and a history of previous issues on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a new tab).
There is a comprehensive specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the readily available ports, protocols, DNS server details (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s gain access to points.
All of it is nice, but considering that there is no third-party audit, you need to trust that what is being used will work. But looking at the active community forum or the in-depth open-source clients puts your mind at ease.
A nice feature of this is that you can see what other people say about the service prior to registering. You don’t have to take their word for it or the word of an audit.
Just How Private Is AirVPN, & Does It Keep Logs?
When it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the business is extremely clear. Online privacy and security are the outright top priority, with security from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack personal privacy. There is no personal details logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.
AirVPN does not track what you do when you’re connected to the VPN, date/time stamps, or your IP address. It only gathers non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and improve services, but you can ask for this details to be erased at any time. This makes it one of the most privacy-friendly VPN services.
As a result, no one can identify you online; not even your ISP can determine what kind of traffic or protocol you’re utilizing.
There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wi-fi network without worrying about your computer and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your information.
Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping strategies will fail against AirVPN since your ISP and government will just see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.
They likewise state they stick to EU personal privacy regulations and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the very same or higher levels of personal privacy and data protection as those in the EU.
You can get a new IP address to hide your IP so that nobody can utilize it to find out who you are. You’ll remain safe with the high-level protection provided.
You can still connect to an AirVPN server through OpenVPN over SSH, SSL, or Tor if your ISP or country blocks OpenVPN.
Open-source clients and a lively community forum allow you to get a sense of what existing users are saying about the service prior to registering.
All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This means that anyone can look into AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, however just ProtonVPN’s apps have been inspected by a 3rd party.
Concerning security, AirVPN’s cryptography is perhaps the very best readily available. It’s similar to that of some other service providers, however still worth pointing out. The first exchange uses 4096-bit RSA to attain Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) through Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying happens every 60 minutes, and the user can reduce this value. The primary data channel utilizes AES-256-CBC encryption.
When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your real email address. That’s excellent since it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be conscious that you won’t be able to change your account’s password if you don’t use one.
Italy, where AirVPN is based, belongs to the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of nations that share intelligence data). But even if the federal government requested user details, AirVPN would have nothing to provide.
Who Or What Is Eddie??
The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s primary open-source application, available on all major platforms and OSes, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regrettably, despite Eddie’s significant capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those suppliers who utilize it as standard.
Setting up the app is easy, and it has all the information you require to connect to a VPN.
There are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to direct you. While it’s not hard to get things working, it does not have the most easy to use user interface, so it may be a more difficult learning curve for inexperienced users.
With Windows, there are a lot of download options. There are builds for different running systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit flavors, and in installable or portable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to explain what’s new and an archive of past releases in case the most existing doesn’t operate on your setup.
After introducing it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. When you’re ended up, you just click Disconnect. Easy enough for anybody, however Eddie can do a lot more since AirVPN offers more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.
2 key AirVPN functions through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN allows you to connect when your computer starts up, but you can’t select which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you selected last.
Even though it defines “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has actually a tab called “network lock” that does the very same thing. The difference is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its safe and secure tunnel. The majority of standard kill switches only do this when the VPN is on, however you can establish the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.
Eddie’s layout is easy to understand. Along the top, there are six tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.
The Overview simply shows the server to which you are connected, the download and upload speeds, the exit IP address, and the connection time. This is where you log into your account.
The Servers page shows all offered servers in the network, along with detailed info about each one, such as the server’s nickname, place, latency in milliseconds from your place, and existing users and server load. Excellent stuff!
This tab likewise has an amber/green signal that lets you understand whether a server is suggested for you.
The Countries page displays the variety of servers readily available in each nation at a glance, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Just like the Servers page, the amber/green sign is likewise shown. Many servers have up to 1000 Mb/s bandwidth, while some smaller sized ones have a 100 Mb/s connection.
A green checkmark, a red “X,” and a blank box can be discovered on the right rail of the Countries tab. Highlight a country, click the green checkmark, and the servers for that country will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is essentially a favorites list; you may choose as numerous nations as you like.
If you click the red “x”, that nation will be eliminated, effectively making it a blocklist/denylist. To get rid of the green checkmark from a country, click the empty box.
By selecting a country, you are not right away connected to a VPN server. To do so, return to the Servers page and choose the server you desire in a specific nation. Connect to a server by marking it and clicking on the “sign out” icon on the right-hand side (a right-facing arrow pointing into a square bracket). There are also a checkmark, “X,” and blank box icons. There’s also a “refresh” button to get updated information on ping times and load times.
The Speed tab shows a simple throughput graph with thin plot lines. Its temporal resolution can be changed, so you can see traffic from the last 10 seconds to one day.
While most apps display your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows fine-grained info, such as the server’s location, load, present user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, data downloaded and uploaded, and a lot more.
Power users, in particular, should value the capability to utilize a VPN with all the information they might ever want about the different locations, down to the variety of users on a specific server. It’s a valuable resource.
Logs is a detailed record of connections, routes, and other information.
A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This permits you to tweak the setup, such as whether it should always connect when opened, which protocol to utilize between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Or whether to try an SSH tunnel through more versatile ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.
The really skilled user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which permit, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface via the Logs pane.
If the vast feature list appears scary, even if you are a VPN expert, it might be difficult to find out what particular settings do and how to get the desired results. In addition, it differs from any other service in regards to personalization.
Don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just due to the fact that of its intricacy. Bear in mind that the program usually functions fine by itself, and you’ll never see the settings until you try to find them. However, if you periodically long for power or configurability, the app will offer it.
Suppose you don’t want to use Eddie. In that case, you can also set up a router or firewall to send out all traffic through a VPN tunnel. This works with routers running the open-source DD-WRT and Tomato firmware and the FreeBSD-based pfSense firewall.
How Good Is AirVPN’s Mobile App?
There isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can use an incredibly feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application provides the exact same comprehensive configuration options as its desktop sibling and useful status details.
Different pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a nation and choose a particular city on the same page. Some helpful text additions make the info more understandable, but it’s still rather tough to comprehend in some spots.
Android does not have as many settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still many more than many people will ever need. The software application also attempts a little more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to explain what each choice does.
Speeds/Performance
Utilizing OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN normally connects rapidly and is ready to go in less than 10 seconds.
Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was great, with the app discovering when the VPN tunnel drops, alerting us with a desktop alert, and reconnecting us in seconds.
In regards to personal privacy, leak tests showed that AirVPN’s Windows client didn’t have any DNS leaks, which shows that the Network Lock/Kill Switch works well.
Now let’s get to those speeds.
Since AirVPN just supports OpenVPN, it was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competitors.
Reviewers have reported speeds to be excellent. Certainly, one stated there wasn’t a single nation where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was really impressive overall.
While it wasn’t rather on top tier for VPNs that use WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for most people, and circumstances like HD video, streaming, and video gaming conferencing absolutely will not slow you down.
What AirVPN lacks is a wider number of server areas. This may limit the availability of nearby servers for some users (which will always lead to much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional option for many people in the United States and Europe, however perhaps less so for other areas.
Streaming
Streaming the big services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple Television, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer, and Discovery+ has been a mixed bag for reviewers. Some report that AirVPN is effective enough to bypass the VPN blocks utilized by Netflix in the USA, whereas others do not.
Some report that Air is quite poor for streaming and does not work with any of the major streaming services. However, it appears to work with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.
Another reviewer states services like BBC iPlayer and US Netflix seldom work, and when they do, finding the best server needs lengthy experimentation. This is probably due to the fact that, unlike other service providers, AirVPN does not use servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.
Fortunately, on AirVPN’s site, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can inspect to see if the situation with these streaming sites ever changes.
Streaming is definitely not an area in which AirVPN excels, simply since that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on personal privacy and security.
Does AirVPN Permit Torrenting?
Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. Simply connect to the VPN server of your choice and get going.
Plus, you can utilize port forwarding to improve your file-sharing performance. Several applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run badly without it, and your computer system’s shares might be inaccessible from the Web.
File sharing has good speeds on local servers, enables port forwarding for up to 20 ports at once (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and deals with leading torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.
AirVPN’s integrated kill switch, activated by default, will obstruct all traffic from leaving your device if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you won’t be sending out unencrypted packets to the Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is extremely hassle-free, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.
Reviewers have shown torrenting to be remarkable, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and with no problems whatsoever.
AirVPN Plans & Prices
AirVPN offers a broader variety of plans than most VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as five devices simultaneously, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other devices all at the same time.
This makes it an outstanding option for individuals who live in a family house or wish to use a VPN on a public network. While five should suffice for many people, other VPN suppliers offer 7 or even 10 if you require more.
Prices varies based on the membership length, and each plan consists of the same features. Most plans offer good value; however, longer memberships provide the very best offer.
The standard pricing is in Euros. Nevertheless, they use the European Central Bank to provide real-time exchange rates for those overseas, so it can be easily transformed to and paid for in the currency of your choice.
The existing plans offered are:
Three days- EUR2
One month – EUR7
Three months – EUR15 – works out to EUR 5/month
Six months – EUR29 – works out to EUR 4.83/month
One year – EUR49 – works out to EUR 4.08/month
Two years – EUR79 – works out to EUR 3.29/month
Three years – EUR99 – works out to EUR 2.75/month
AirVPN accepts major credit cards, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and a whole load of cryptocurrencies, consisting of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of worldwide options are also accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.
AirVPN offers a three-day totally free trial, which can be obtained by sending a message to the support team and using the discount coupon code they send you.
There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee, as long as they haven’t broken the terms of service or used more than 5 GB of data throughout that time.
AirVPN Customer Support
AirVPN has a different customer support offering than numerous other VPNs. While it does not have live chat, it offers email assistance and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has a very active assistance online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.
Significantly, AirVPN’s email support isn’t contracted out but can be a little inconsistent with the time it takes to get an action. That stated, the email assistance is high quality, and the representatives are practical and friendly, but the extensive answers can be pretty technical, which might put off those new to VPNs.
AirVPN’s site has a great deal of info, consisting of a big FAQs area that is broken up by subject.
AirVPN’s community forums cover many different topics, however novices will have the very same difficulties understanding a great deal of the tech lingo in the posts.
AirVPN Pros & Cons
Pros:
No logging Whatsoever.
Exceptional speeds with very little loss.
Unrestricted P2P allowed with Port Forwarding.
Strong security on servers and apps alike, with advanced protocols and encryption.
Network Lock/Kill Switch.
Split tunneling.
Supports Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile, and routers.
Supports Tor over VPN.
Easy app installation and usage.
Many, many advanced settings and customization choices in the client app.
Solid Customer Care.
Active Community Forums and Detailed Guides.
Good prices, particularly for longer-term plans.
Optional block lists protect you from ads, adware, trackers, and hazardous sources.
Cons:
Only fully supports OpenVPN.
Client app isn’t very user-friendly or pretty like other services.
Client app may overwhelm newer users.
It is really hit and miss with streaming services.
No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.
Perhaps there are too many advanced options.
Located in 14-Eyes Nation.
Server numbers are relatively low.
Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Option?
The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reliable, and safe VPN service with excellent pricing. It’s clearly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be much better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN supplier. Even new users might do much, much worse.
While it could be challenging to use if you’re brand-new to VPNs, you’ll get much quicker speeds and much better results than much of its competing VPN competitors.
This VPN service is more focused on safeguarding your personal privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu when it comes down to it.
Although it may not ensure the very same level of privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and allows you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a great alternative for customers who value their privacy.
While it doesn’t hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s definitely the very best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an exceptional choice for online filesharing.
Highly recommended!
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AirVPN: Is It Well Worth It? (Revised 2022)
